R.E. Slater - Jars of Clay (poem)

"For you are God's artwork, created in Christ Jesus for good works,

which God prepared beforehand to complete and behold." - abridged, Eph 2.10

Jars of Clay

by R.E. Slater

Is there a reconciliation that may be found

At the weathered hands of Father Time -

Where hearts are broken beyond remits

Groaning loving-care’s clarion chimes?

Ringing o' ringing in the halls of wear

Unheard a dulled ear’s deaf stirrings -

Unwearied ensnaring grasping fares

Soon ruined a dark reef’s moorings?

Then away, away, come away at once

To faith’s fraught shoals and lauded lands -

Where sycamore trees arise tall bonded communions

And butterscotch'd groves flow o’er grace’s rolling strands.

Bathed in rosetted fugues of cherry blossoms perfuming sweet airs

Thence to lie 'twined amid the hallowing silences of shrouded black boles -

In spellbound hush o'er lush verdant swards of pilloried souls risen all-glorious

Lifting as thrice bound sonatas upon forgiveness’ flutes of fruit’d harmonies.

Whence plucked death’s withering hands and unsparing scythe unreaped

Bursting unfettered lo discord’s mighty lairs of chaining darkness -

Rupturing from cold earth's torn despairs and chiming griefs

Forever moored glad Fellowship’s eternal fortresses.

Nay, if ever a reconciliation ere be found in thee

Pray fall Incarnate Love unsparingly -

Poured from yielded earthen jars of knelling clays

Birthing sweet ambrosial nectars remitting parched souls a’thirst.


R.E. Slater
Sept - Nov 2011

@copyright R.E. Slater Publications
all rights reserved

AUTHOR’S NOTES

I have written and re-written this verse attempting to purge its sealed mysteries into sight for us poor earth-bound souls faithless and benighted in humanity’s withholding cloths of fleshly concerns and mortal pales. I wanted to fashion a poem that collided intense descriptions with lurid imagery, and against irregularly compressed metaphors, again, and again, and again, until we wearied of the words and could only read it numbed and lost within the verse’s sublimity.

I further wished to avoid reading this poem in tripping verse, or in everyday rhyming parlance, and have broken up the meter just enough to momentarily pause the eyes and arrest our attentions. There is, however, a slight cadence that can be found within its phrases when initiated by breathing stops and pauses. I also imposed an uncommon structure onto it that would mash together its sacred thoughts into a blinding composition of white light, whose prismatic rainbow is only seen when read more thoughtfully.

Lastly, I wished to convey life’s greater adventures found within the rich compositions of everyday joys and wonders, beheld in the arts, in sound and canvas, horticulture and nature, sacred communions and worship. How each abounds to us at the Divine’s hand as they can abound from us to one another’s hands when practicing the arts of service to one another. For is not the heart of creation like that of its Creator?

Hence, we may deliver life - against death’s imposing grip - when seeking to help and assist those near to us in common ways. Through the simplicities of listening, sharing, respecting, loving. We do this in the knowledge that we are chosen vessels brought into this life to enrich one-another’s lives - however beggarly they may first appear to our sight or circumstances. For it is not the vessel itself that brings life’s fullness to bear, but the ambrosial nectars that that vessel holds within which enriches friendships and fallow, wheel and fortune.

Curiously, this poem’s thematic elements blend in with its visual shape, and when later discovering this I made both one, into a visual poem about becoming jars of clay. For it is in the very act of service to others - and only then - that our true purpose may be found in acts of sharing with one another in a community of common-use pottery. Some dinged up and battered, others enriched and ornate. But no matter, it is the nectars within the vessel that gives all-and-one joy and usefulness. And yet, there are some pots that are cracked, and others that leak, that can give no service to anyone until bound-up and restored into service’s assembly. The metaphor extends even further when considering unused dusty bowls and unwashed pots unprepared for service to anyone until discovered and re-purposed by a fellowship’s divine.

For should we disdain the use of our talents and abilities, powers and resources, knowledge and connections, it is to give harm to our societies forever fraught with greed and ambition, pride and jealousy, unkindness and sin. But to become vessels that pour out grace and mercy, humility and kindness, courageousness and truth, is to present a society of men and women strengthened into living, organic fortresses immovable, beauteous and inviting.

So then, it is not how pretty the pot… nor how banged-up and unpainted the bowl or jar…. Value is not found in the thing itself. But in the vessel’s use and service. A simple thing to explain but one forever misunderstood in practice and practicalities. Be then mere “jars of clay” become vessels useful for service.

R.E. Slater

Nov 7, 2011

"But now, O LORD, you are our Father;
we are the clay, and you are our potter;
we are all the work of your hand."

- Isaiah 64.8

"But we have this treasure in jars of clay,

to show that the surpassing power

belongs to God and not to us."

- 2 Corinthians 4.7

'Unschooling' Gaining Popularity, Allows Children Alternative Learning Tools

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/08/29/unschooling-gaining-popul_n_940770.html

By LEANNE ITALIE
August 29, 2011



School's never out for 14-year-old Zoe Bentley. Nor is it ever in.

The perky teen from Tucson, Ariz., explores what she likes, when she likes as deeply as she chooses every day of the year. As an "unschooler," Zoe is untethered from the demands of traditional, compulsory education.

That means, at the moment, she's checking out the redwoods of California with her family, tinkering with her website and looking forward to making her next video on her favorite subject, exogeology, the study of geology on other planets.

"I love seeing the history of an area," Zoe said. "Maybe a volcano erupted and grew taller over time, or wind eroded rock into sand dunes, or a meteor hit the ground and made a crater. Finding out how these and other formations formed is something I just really like."

Zoe's cheer: "Exogeology rocks!"

Unschooling has been around for several decades, but advocates say there has been an uptick as more families turn to home-schooling overall.

Reliable data is hard to come by, but estimates of children and teens home-schooled in the U.S. range from 1.5 million to 2 million. Of those, as many as one-third could be considered unschoolers like Zoe, meaning their parents are "facilitators," available with materials and other resources, rather than topdown "teachers."

There's no fixed curriculum, course schedule or attempt to mimic traditional classrooms. Unless, of course, their children ask for those things.

Zoe, for instance, wanted to know more about geology once she turned 12, so she signed up for a class at Pima Community College. "I had to take a placement test, which was the first test I'd ever taken," she said. "It was surprisingly easy."

She has since taken several other college classes, including astrobiology, algebra and chemistry. Maybe, Zoe said, "I'll earn a degree, but the important thing to me is to learn what I need to and want to know. Everything else is a bonus."

John Holt, considered the father of "unschooling," would have been proud. The fifth-grade teacher died in 1985, leaving behind books and other reflections that include his 1964 work "How Children Fail."

The book and others Holt later wrote propelled him into the spotlight as he argued that mainstream schools stymie the learning process by fostering fear and forcing children to study things they have no interest in.

Colorado unschool mom Carol Brown couldn't agree more.

"Being bored makes school miserable for a lot of kids, plus there is the element of compulsion, which completely changes any activity," the filmmaker said.

Brown and her husband unschooled their oldest daughter until she left for college and their youngest until her junior year in high school, when she chose to attend Telluride Mountain School, a small, progressive school near home.

"Unschooling parents are doing what good parents do anyway when they're on summer vacation," Brown said. "We just had more time to do it."

Like other unschoolers, Brown's girls had books and films, art supplies and building materials growing up. They visited beaches, museums and forests. "There's no one right way for every child to learn or grow up," Brown said. "Freedom is essential for that reason."

For Clark Aldrich's 16-year-old son in Connecticut, that meant raising hens for his own business selling eggs. "It's a good way to learn about animals, commerce and economics as well as inventory," Aldrich said.

Pat Farenga of Medford, Mass., unschooled his three daughters with his wife but said: "I don't see unschooling or homeschooling as the answer for everybody. It's the answer for those who choose it."

Farenga, who worked with Holt, said Holt coined the term "unschooling" in 1977 but was never terribly fond of it. It stuck for lack of a better description. He considers unschooling a subset of home-schooling, while some unschoolers see themselves more akin to democratic free schools, a century-old movement based on a philosophy of self-directed learning and equality in decision-making.

As an educator, Holt's journey began with his career in posh private schools, then more progressive ones.

"He called progressive schools soft jails and public schools hard jails," Farenga said. "He described learning that takes place outside of school, but doesn't have to take place at home and doesn't have to look like school learning."

Rare, unschoolers said, are children who never find reasons to pick up the basics – and beyond. That could mean reading later than many parents might be comfortable with, or ignoring math until they see a reason on their own to use it.

Unschoolers operate under state laws governing home-schooling, which is legal in all 50 states. Such regulations vary tremendously by state, with some requiring standardized tests or adherence to a set curriculum and others nothing more than a letter from parents describing what their kids are up to. Unschoolers said they have no trouble meeting their states' requirements.

In Alaska, for example, home-schooling parents don't have to notify officials, file any forms or have their children tested.

In Sugar Land, Texas, Elon Bomani's 11-year-old son has never been to school and doesn't know how to write cursive. She doesn't care. When he was younger and had no interest in learning how to read, she found a video on the subject and put it on for him to discover – or ignore as he wished. He's a reader today. Her younger son, who's 6, learned to read when he discovered Garfield comic books.

"If children find something that they love, they'll read," Bomani said.

Ken Danford, a former middle school history teacher, has two kids who love their schools, but he doesn't think classroom learning works for all. That's why he co-founded and runs North Star, a program that offers an array of self-directed activities and welcomes teen unschoolers in Hadley, Mass.

Danford considers himself a Holt groupie, based largely on his experience as a dad and an eighth-grade teacher for five years.

"Coming to my class juiced to learn U.S. history was not that common," he said. "Kids wanted to know, was it going to be on the test, can we go outside, can we go to the bathroom?"

For parents interested in unschooling who don't want to quit their outside-the-home jobs, "we try to make it available, realistic, manageable for any regular kid," Danford said.

Unschoolers have their own publications, message boards and websites, like www.Theunschoolersemporium.com. The site's owner, mom Sara McGrath near Seattle, blogs regularly about unschooling.

McGrath, who has three daughters, notes the approach is more than hands-on, child-directed, experience-based learning.

"It doesn't describe a specific alternative to schooling. It just gets schooling out of the way so various unique dynamic personal creative ways of growing up, living, participating and contributing to communities can develop," she writes.

To McGrath, unschooling means looking at life "as a creative adventure," a cooperative lifestyle involving the entire family.

Kellie Rolstad is an associate professor of education and applied linguistics at Arizona State University in Tempe. She teaches a graduate seminar on unschooling and free schools each spring. She also unschools her three children, ages 11, 13 and 14.

"School was really wasting our time," she said. "The kids had so many things they wanted to do and places they wanted to go and things they wanted to talk about, and all we could do was mindless homework. It was very frustrating."

How does she know if her kids are learning anything at all? "You just do," she said, as parents know how things are going when their kids are babies or toddlers.

Rolstad's oldest, Xander MacSwan, completed fifth grade in public school before moving on to unschooling.

"I felt like school kind of pushed things on you," he said. "In school, learning was just a boring event where you did a lot of math questions. Now I'm into music and science and all kinds of things."

Xander is building computers with his friends. He and some buddies spent a couple of months with a blacksmith to learn how to forge their own swords. He took a class on the history of rock `n' roll at a college and plays guitar, piano, bass, violin and ukulele. He had to give up the saxophone when he got his braces.

Had he stayed in school, he said, his goal of pursuing music as a career wouldn't feel quite so real: "With unschooling you can do things how you want to."

Additional Resources

External Links - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unschooling

The Unschoolers Emporium - www.Theunschoolersemporium.com

Sojourneys Update: Isaan, Thailand!

this is My Father's world...

Isaan! 

http://davevoetberg.blogspot.com/2011/08/isaan.html

God's Country
http://davevoetberg.blogspot.com/2011/08/gods-country.html

by Dave Voetberg
Monday, August 22, 2011

This past weekend I got to take a trip out to Northeast Thailand (Isaan) w/ a Pastor friend of mine from Chiang Mai. He had some teaching/preaching lined up in a town called Galasin, & I got to go along for the ride. And more specifically, we've been talking about the possibility of me moving out there in 2 months; so I got to gauge a bit of what that might look like. Honestly, I think it's safe to say I'm sold & would love to labor down there for Christ & the people of Galasin. Heartbreakingly, only .01% of the 1,000,000 people in this area are said to be Christians. As one friend mentioned to me recently, it's "virtually unreached." That's all the motivation a Christian needs.

One open door of ministry down there (& and a means of supporting myself) would be thru teaching English (though I have no college degree) at one of the schools in the area. So right now, I'm looking into/praying about that, hoping God will fight that battle for me. Other than that, I know starting home churches would also be what I'd get to be apart of down there. Really, pretty much starting fresh in an area that Paul would be excited about. He said it was his "ambition to preach the gospel, not where Christ has already been named." Galasin is just that. A foundation hasn't been laid, with many people never even having heard the name "Jesus" before, much less the gospel. What a beautiful opportunity! Laboring among a people who are nearly untouched with the gospel & watching God do God-sized things for His glory, as He "gather(s) into one the children of God who are scattered abroad."

Your prayers are appreciated more than you know.

All for Jesus & thailand,

Dave

be careful!

the open road.

129 more steps to go.

worth the hike.

this is My Father's world.

Me and A.W. Tozer

One of the first really profound books I ever read about God (besides the Bible!) was A.W. Tozer's, The Knowledge of the Holy. I must've been 21 at the time and still don't remember how I had discovered this poignant book unless it was at the Christian book store I worked at from time to time to help with my apartment rent. I had been attending the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor for the last three years, having begun my freshman year of university training at the conclusion of the Vietnam War era, where I was studying math and engineering, which wouldn't have been unusual except that it was I who was mostly out-of-place.

 

 

You see, my brothers and I were the last of six generations to live on the family farm, which was one of the earliest homesteads to the Paris Township district of southeast Grand Rapids, Michigan... having become little more than a place to house disused farm equipment, tools and assorted paraphernalia. Our farm was operational for the first part of my early life while also having the great benefit of grandparents living next door... whose friends and relatives came in a steady stream to share stories of the early 1900's. Speaking occasionally in hushed tones, or in raucous laughter, of farming life, work and play, schooling and family reunions - my ever attentive grandmother collected them all. For she was our family's historian who patiently taught us our family's rich oral legends all the way back to the early 1800's - how our family came to the area from Canada and New York; their survival against a wilderness still populated by Indians and bears; how our ancestors created orchards from pocket seed, and fields from dense swamps and thick forests; and how a ready axe could build fortified cabins, barns and homes. And with Grandma's passing many years later came with it the thunderous passing of 200 years of local lores and legends gathered from the lips of that stream of humanity that had entered her hallowed residency over the long years of our early lives.

 

 

It was in my eleventh year of life that our country school would close; where my brothers and I would complete five generations of Slater's and Patterson's that had been in attendance at this clapboard building (or its earlier log-school-rendition until hit by lightening and burned down after 20 years of faithful service). A school built by our earliest descendants 135 years earlier in a time when there were few inhabitants. There, we were given the rich blessings of a very high, and personally interactive, education in a one-room school bearing 19 students from grades K through 8th - which made my class sometimes two and sometimes three in valiant number. But it was to my greatest disappointment that I never graduated from that warm little school setting up upon a distant hill several fields away from our farm. And was thrust into public high school like my father had experienced, and like my aunts and uncles had done a lifetime earlier. But they had the one thing I never had... the opportunity to graduate from this little one-room school. Even as their aunts and uncles had graduated before them, and theirs before them, going back five generations in antecedal time. But until my dad's day, none of their generations before his brothers and sisters had gone forward into high school, because in reality, 8th grade was about as far as any country kid would necessarily go who was needed to help on the family farm. Nor would I have the pleasure of listening to my mother play Pomp and Circumstance as we paced our small, studied, steps from the back of the school to the front before the dozen or so parents and relatives gathered to greet us in regal applause and wide smiles underneath the large framed portraits of George Washington and Abraham Lincoln.

 

No, the school was forced to close - and with it my golden aspirations - at the end of my fifth grade year after six blissful years of attendance. Our little country school had become part of a much larger city that adopted us into its own seething cauldrons of discontent and malediction. I was now to be inducted into the ways of public education through means of indoctrination at the behest of a very large middle school with hundreds of rowdy kids who liked to have gang fights at noon recess ringed around by hooligans howling for more teeth and blood until tardy, overweight, teachers ran out into the back fields and sandlots to break the savage fights up. My next middle school a year later, and the high schools (there were two - an old one, and then a new one) that I would attend two years after that, provided a decent enough education to a country boy who was still discovering what it was like to live in a foreign and unknown era called the modern era that held little evidence of the close-knit farming community I had grown up in. I played in the marching band, won a place on the baseball team (infield), and collected friends as best as I could. But I also knew that I was socially misplaced, and stood at the outer fringes of my new school's social circles. I had lived too far out in the country - and for too long - to have any possibility of close friendships over the years, and grew content in finding what I could in those thin days of social living. And so, being ill-prepared for my next step into the much larger world of university training and war rallies (though I grew up with the Vietnam War prominently displayed in nightly melodrama on our black-and-white television set) my next stage of life would shortly begin to both my loss and my gain. My loss, in that my past life was about to close forever even as my dad's days of farming and community were ending; and my gain, in that I would become enculturated to modernity. And though I did not know it, I was to participate in this abysmal Vietnam war in some small way to be soon discovered even though I had turned down a governmental appointment to the United State Air Force Academy the summer before.

 

 

And this is how I came to be daily walking through the heart of the University of Michigan's central campus during aggrieved hippie sit-ins, strident war demonstrations, boisterous peace rallies, mass marijuana protests by the tens of thousands, and inhaling the thick acrid smell of acid and weed floating throughout West Quad's dorm hallways (I lived in Wenley House for 2 years. Taking the stairs to the fourth floor my first year; and my own spacious corner room on Thompson Avenue and East Madison the next). Also discovered (not!) were the ever-stimulating athletic jock parties by weekend sybaritists whose alcoholic binges culminated in the weekly destruction of our very small lounge and rec room where I and my friend would enjoy competitive ping-pong when needing a much needed break from our 18-hour days of demanding studies. And, as one of my last inconsequential memories, we had a national insurrection group known as the Black Panthers bomb our dorm’s public toilets and showers six doors down from my dorm room. Other than making life inconvenient for me and my dorm mates for the remainder of our spring semester (it required us to hike up two stories to use the other available men’s facilities) I little understood the purpose of this mindless destruction of hedonism and personal angst. Nonetheless, I had gotten use to the craziness that enveloped America's college campuses during the late 1960s and early 1970s, having myself witnessed its last year of ebbing war demonstrations at a major university slapped with the label the Berkley-of-the-Midwest. And yet, in many other ways, I have very fond memories - both pleasant and vivid - of my days at college.... Made more so because of excellent professors, phenomenal studies and research, youth's many exquisite adventures of curiosity and fun, several rec teams and intramural squads, great Christian fellowships (IVP, Navigators, Campus Crusade) and church, and the early days of first love. Each experience was personally formidable and enhancing in ways I would never had received if still at home.

 

 

And so, it was at this point in my third year of study that I was now living on the second floor of an old church rectory on the other side of campus which was shared with seven other young Christian men between its collection of five antiquated rooms (mine was wrapped in burlap cloth on the walls). That bore a closed-off porch room at the end of the rectory's second story hallway serving as a local residence for a family of raccoons that liked to rummage amongst its forgotten and dusty contents of ancient years gone by. Which housed a small, but well stocked, academic bible bookstore on the floor below and quietly laid off main street near to the student stores, pubs, pizza joints and community centers. Next door was a very old, Episcopalian style church, laid in by cut masonry and large stones, and housing a very large sanctuary where a hundred-or-more Black Pentecostal worshipers would gather on Sunday evenings in folding chairs and large Cadillacs parked fender to fender outside. Within its bowels lay a large, stainless, kitchen from which we ate our weekly starvation rations; an unused basketball court I daily played upon beneath very high, and very large, stain windows holding back the sun's dark rays; and a wooden steeple resting in the shadows of Michigan's Bell Tower off State street rising o'er the autumnal blooms of fall before ushering in fell Michigan snows bringing howling drifts and colder walks to the distant campus. This very old church had grown-up, and in a manner, died, as its earlier pioneering families came-and-went-and-passed away. And next door lived a little old woman who blessed my heart as I listened to her faith stories weekly. As with all things, my evangelical church (Grace Bible) purchased it for use before outgrowing its sturdy premises and moving to the outer fringes of Ann Arbor's city boundaries, there to become a much larger assembly of virulent believers driving family sedans and soccer vans, to be pastored by a much beloved, and bespeckled, Jewish pastor from Johannesburg, South Africa, steeped in fiery elocution and a passionate love for Jesus.

 

It was impossible not to be absorbed into Grace Bible Church's gregarious evangelical culture preaching Jesus and His amazing love Sunday to Sunday while ministering astringently to my campus on the other. Our college youth group of many hundreds strong, held evangelistic campus rallies and fascinating missionary Sundays. Flocked to noisy Michigan Stadium to watch Bo Schembechler football. Sang popular Campus Crusade songs on Sunday morning bus rides out to the placid church perched five miles away. Held lunches and suppers with the church's many open-hearted families and senior adults. And hosted fun college fellowships on any given weekend - complete with food for hungry college kids living out on their own. In a way, a sense of balance was being restored to me for the many years that I had missed, but it was not because I craved Christian fellowship (though I did) but because I hungered for a humanity withheld from my earlier country wanderings, having few neighbours and fewer friends. Nor did I ever feel uncomfortable with non-Christian friends or my campus' university surroundings, its programs and wide-variety of opportunities for student involvement. I participated in all of it as studies allowed while little noticing an unsettling disenchantment beginning to worm its way into my soul requiring my eventual displacement at great distress to those I loved. Still, even to this day, I much prefer a non-church environment to that of a closed-cultural Christian setting. More probably because I enjoy people, listening to their stories, and having the chance to befriend any-and-all whenever possible. Which I suppose harkens back to my childhood and teen years when nary a soul my age could be found in its stark isolations and bleak solitudes.

 

 

For it was in those early days of itinerant preachers visiting a little one-room country school, and attending Sunday Schools once a week in my growing Baptist church, and perceiving in a first blush of realization that Jesus' gospel of love and salvation was meant for me, though eleven years of age. Whereto, many years later, I was to discover the depths of A.W. Tozer's blessed little book, opening my eyes to the majesty and transcendency of a holy God who was my Father, my Savior, my Redeemer-Protector. Who was wholly-other than I myself, and who became wholly incarnate man to share with me my turmoils, strifes, guilt and shame. And as I read and studied the Bible I found a spiritual rejuvenation and astonished illumination as a young, growing Christian, that somehow led me to Tozer's little book towards a higher, clearer understanding of God, that to this day does not dim, nor rings in my heart's chambers less true, than before all other bells that have rung and gone silent in their ringing.

 

And it is to this well-thumbed book that I would encourage devotional readings for any would-be converts. For me, it proved a difficult book to grasp, and required of me to read and re-read its passages until I understood what it was saying. It stretched my youthful mind and soul in ways previously unknown. And continues to amaze me before its sturdy little passages when contemplating the newer disciplines of post-modernism, relational and open theism, and emergent, postmodern Christianity. And though I doubted this country boy could ever have left his early 1900s agrarian roots from a post-industrial era - from a land and community I deeply loved and grieved - I have with the Spirit's help attempted at first to wear modernism's casual change of clothes, and now, post-modernism's radical hippie colours, knowing that the revelation of God revealed by His very personage and divine presence is relevant for all time, all seasons, and all circumstances. Where someday I may change whatever attire I may be found for a fresh pair on whitened garments ironed in the glistening rays of the dazzling Son of Man. My Lord. My Savior. My King.

 

Thou hidden love of God, whose height,

Whose depth unfathomed, no man knows,

I see from far Thy beauteous light,

Inly, I sigh for Thy repose;

My heart is pained, nor can it be

At rest till finding rest [at last] in Thee.

                               - Gerhard Tersteegen

R.E. Slater

September 1, 2011
revised, August 6, 2013
 
A.W. Tozer - The Knowledge of the Holy

 
 
 

Are Christians Called to Cultural War?

by Laura Ziesel

Monday, August 22, 2011

Two years ago I wrote a few posts in which I engaged with Recovering Biblical Manhood and Womanhood by John Piper and Wayne Grudem. I never addressed one of the undercurrents of the book, but today I'm going to do so because it popped up again in a recent blog post about male and female roles, Taking Dominion. Taking Dominion is on the blog of Justin Taylor, but it is a guest post by Robert Sagers and is an interview of Mark Chanski.

What's the undercurrent Recovering Biblical Manhood and Womanhood and Taking Dominion have in common? Christians are to be counter cultural.

In Recovering Biblical Manhood and Womanhood, Duncan and Stinson say, "The church has been called to counter and bless the culture" (xi). In Taking Dominion, Chanski said, "[The church should be] unapologetically countercultural in our teaching of the Scriptures." Both of these quotes are justifying a heated opposition to feminism, something that I find bewildering. Sure, feminists are wrong about some things. But feminists are also right about a lot of things. So why do we throw the baby out with the bath water? Because we are gridlocked in a stubborn culture war.

Above and beyond the feminism debate, I want to address the issue of being "called" to be counter cultural. Opposing “the culture of the day” is often something I have heard we should do as Christians. So, let’s examine what that means.

First, a few things that don't sit well with me:

1) Both of the above quotes seem to indicate a lack of understanding regarding the fact that we live among dozens of cultures as Americans. Shall we simultaneously be counter cultural to each separate culture? That’s quite difficult since they are often opposed to one another.

2) It is implied that Christians should be counter cultural regardless of what values are upheld by the culture. But acting in that way only encourages pride, stunts the growth of the Church, and ignores the Spirit of God at work among all peoples. 

In fact, the Church can learn a lot from nonChristians, and if nonChristians agree en masse about something, that's called culture. And sometimes nonChristian culture is right. Many cultures without the influence of the Church, for instance, are right about the importance of respect for their elders. Other cultures are right about personal liberty in the face of oppression. So to be blindly counter cultural ignores the image of God emblazoned on each and every culture. Somewhere in each culture, He's there. We must learn to recognize those aspects, learn from them, and use them as inroads for the Gospel.

3) Perhaps more embedded in the counter cultural stance of the Church is the message that you nonChristians, not us Christians, are full of worldly culture. A false dichotomy is established: You need redeeming while we are agents of redemption. The implication is that either a) the Church is cultureless or b) the Church has its own holy culture, and c) the Church is susceptible to the disease of contemporary culture and must always fight it.

And that is a major problem.

3A) It is not true that the Church is cultureless. Culture is everywhere, even in God’s established Church. When tutoring some middle school students years ago, they asked me to define the word culture. The best thing I could come up with on the spot was the explanation that culture are those things in your life that seem normal to your family or friends but abnormal to other people. That definitely isn’t the most sophisticated definition of culture, but I think it is helpful. The Church is full of behaviors and values that are abnormal to people outside (and often inside) our community. To say that any group of human beings can be cultureless is to be ignorant of what culture is.

3B) In addition, it is impossible for the Church to be culturally holy. My argument for this is not theological as much as it is practical. The global Church is multicultural, and many of the cultures among our own brothers and sisters are contradictory to one another. Cultures within the American church alone oppose one another. On a global scale, the differences among cultures of the Church are overwhelming. So which one is right? American middle-class Southern Baptist culture? New England upper-class Presbyterian (PCA) culture? Kenyan poverty-escaping Pentecostal culture? Chinese house-church culture? They certainly don’t all agree.

3C) I wholeheartedly agree that the Church is susceptible to the influence of worldly culture. But I disagree just as wholeheartedly that worldly culture is “out there” and is advancing into the Church unless we fight it. Because neither A nor B is true, it holds that the Church is culturally imperfect just as the world is.

So the problem with our view of the disease of culture is not that it exists, but where it exists. The Church should be made up of people who point to themselves and say, "Me. It's me. I am the problem with the world." When Christians, as His representatives on Earth, fail to recognize the sin in our own hearts, even the cultural sin, we mar His image and bring ill repute to His name. Yes, there is sin in the world that we should fight. But we must always look to find the sin in ourselves first. When pastors, authors, and teachers encourage us to counter contemporary culture without regard for the broken cultures within the Church, we look like a bunch of finger-pointing hypocrites.

I agree completely that the Church should be outside of culture, and even counter to it at times. But being counter cultural should not be the aim of Christians and Christian teaching. We should be advancing God’s redemption first into our own hearts and then into the heart of each and every culture on the globe. But God’s redemption certainly doesn’t look like the exact opposite of whatever culture you are in. To be blindly counter cultural regardless of the context is to make an idol of culture by shaping the Gospel around it instead of shaping our cultures around the Gospel.

Instead of simply being countercultural, let’s counter the fallen and broken aspects of all cultures, even Church cultures. But while we do so, let’s honor and build upon the redemptive glimpses of God that we find [within the cultures we have among us!].

Vocational Educational Reform in America, Part 2

In January or February of 2011 U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan expressed the very ideas I have been discussing with my school district over the last several years regarding the replacement of our academic college prep programs with occupational/vocational curricula degree programs that would vary from 2-3-4 years in length while allowing for early graduation and/or cross-over studies. These programs would be found in the major areas listed below, among others:

• Sciences (Medical, Environmental, etc)
• Engineering and Technology (including Architecture, etc)
• Arts and Literature
• Music and Drama
• Social Sciences
• Business

With the creation of these degree programs we would do so in cooperation with area businesses, industries and social agencies seeking to train their local human resources. As such, these occupational courses should be open-ended to allow a young person to rejoin his educational interests should he or she need to graduate early and work. They should also create a strong linkage to the local community college's educational core curricula supported within that district's area of operation.

Why provide early educational graduations? To alleviate schools from the burden of housing students who either can't be in school or don’t want to be in school thus saving already restricted tax monies now being re-allocated elsewhere; to give kids a way to become economically independent and responsible; to create a younger employment force that could add to a district's already strained tax base; thus creating more monies for school districts from a larger tax base; and finally, to reduce youth crime through early employment responsibility.

Too, major state universities have economically hurt America by restricting middle-class scholarships and forcing higher tuition rates (probably since the 1980s). These rates have become unsustainable by middle income families and have caused middle class youths to migrate to regional or community colleges seeking lower tuition costs while leaving the very wealthy to attend America's landmark universities. As a result America's middle class is quickly disappearing and we are finding a more pronounced class stratification more than ever as the rich have become richer and the poor have become poorer. America's backbone has been broken and we see this with the loss of jobs, entrepreneurships, and successful ventures across middle America.

Further, state universities have expanded degree program requirements rather than concentrating them as they necessarily push remedial education onto every entering freshman who have come unprepared for college study. Undergraduates are now graduating between 22-26 years of age because of the several factors involving poor educational preparation, the increased costs of college and the lack of economically viable jobs for lesser trained individuals.

And so, instead of having our nation's youth effectively (or efficiently) competing on global levels in the world-at-large by the ages of 16-19, we as a nation have created a half-life for our nation’s kids now entering into the workforce after a third of their life has passed cradled within our nation's school systems. The sheer talent of energy and brainpower has been lost between those intervening 10 years of educational study and purposeful postponement of talented laborers confined by our educational systems. America must reform its educational regiments and it must be holistic, rigorous and complete for as it stands now we've boxed ourselves in by too many degrees, longer core studies and fewer workplace opportunities.

When China and India are graduating 300 engineers to every 1 of ours it doesn’t take many smarts to realize that we’re on the losing end of a global competition. And while we both under-train and over-qualify our kids we are losing out. And by pushing our future tax bases into their late-20's we’re restricting the flow of necessary funds that would come sooner with a younger, more productive youth force.

About the only good that can be said about America's current educational system is that their community college programs have stepped up to the consumer plate and are offering shorter-term degrees and apprenticeship solutions for early entry highschoolers, needy urban youths, and economically-minded families and youths unwilling to go further into debt for a nebulous university degree with no concrete job prospects and outrageous school loan repayment plans.

In summary, middle schools should be teaching first and second year high school basics; high schools should be implementing occupational degree programs; and universities should stop teaching high school courses and get on with a variety of shorter-term, highly concentrated degree programs that integrate with business and industrial apprenticeship programs resulting in more certain job placements after college graduation. As such, American business and industry would not need to add yet another year or three of specialized training to the entering college student’s agendas thus pushing our aging youth further from their productive years of contribution and resource building.

And this is how I would describe national educational deficiencies and degrading economic metrics for our nation's educational systems. In hindsight, it's amazing we’ve gotten this far by our outmoded 20th-century style of mass-producing literate students known as "public education!" It is time for radical change - one that makes sense for our kids and for our communities so that America can globally compete with a rising world seeking to integrate its literate societies with other viable, literate societies in a stealthy web of cooperation and competition.

RE Slater

March 2011

Vocational Educational Reform in America, Part 1

Vocational national educational reform in America must occur in our local school districts to allow for more equal competition on the global stage of performance beginning with the replacement of our traditional system of mass learning and then orientating schools towards occupational curriculas, local internships, self-paced programs, and earlier graduation programs beginning in the 2nd to the 4th year of high school study. It must give the desperate assistance required to the poorest and least empowered of our nation while at the same time recover our languishing middle classes slipping into the waysides of our society and becoming a mere labor force rather than an entrepreneurial workforce that is aggressive and business-minded.

It must be flexible enough to allow for the greatest expansion and the greatest opportunity for that youthful segment of our society that is most desirous of innovation and success, most impacted by our decisions, and most willing to hope great hopes of aspiration. Anything less than this is to watch our schools slide into oblivion, and our societies with it, as our educational system drains its peoples and its students of national effectiveness and God-given rights to become a trained, literate, impassioned, responsive work force and a highly functioning, interconnected, inter-dependent society of the 21st Century.

I believe we need a new type of national school system. One that will reduce the current high school and college educational programs from 4 to 3 to 2 years, and that is orientated around an occupational curricula that allows for core expansion and crossover studies. One that would allow for shortened learning cycles so that those students requiring immediate employment may find those opportunities within a school's job/career training center which may meet their more immediate personal and family needs. That schools would make available to young people a variety of occupational apprenticeships so that they may become sufficiently qualified to compete for jobs with the confidence that comes from effective training and study. It is critical that the public school system orientate itself towards an occupational curricula and remove the general academic curricula now in place. To intentionally present an earlier level of skill sets that a young person both desires and needs. To abandon its current standards of No Child Left Behind and MEAP Testing with the more practical standards of training and apprenticeship that could sit alongside that of the more academic traditional form of study.

And with the successful placement of a young person into the work force a community will soon discover improving returns both fiscally and relationally. Not only is the job market satisfied but so too will be a district's need for finances and resources. A larger tax base is being nurtured and with that comes monies to operate our schools. As it is now, the costs of educational training well into the college years and beyond is placing the nation's student population further and further from effective employment. Public education has become too expensive and the vast majority of students within our public schools and colleges are overwhelming our resources with higher tuition fees, newer taxes, and dwindling employment returns.

Statedly, America’s costs of education have become too high and its process of education has become too lengthy for the value that our nation needs at this critical time to compete against the larger, more skilled work forces being produced in countries like India and China. By restructuring academic degree programs (as well as related costs) America can produce a more efficiently trained workforce for lesser jobs not requiring the traditional path of high school and college training currently underway. Too, it will free up educational resources to concentrate upon more intensive training required by other skill sets that an individual may wish to pursue requiring longer graduation times. Not everyone requires competent knowledge in algebra 3 or organic chemistry, but this is not to say that this education should not be offered. Yet in the world of pragmatic metrics and Internet resources the job market is requiring more and more specific skill sets and less and less broad-based general educational knowledge that our traditional schools have been in the business of providing.

It is not too honest to say that the public education system, primarily the middle school and high school systems, have become outmoded and impractical. And while our community colleges have offered the highest response to occupational training I would fault major universities with creating unnecessary and time-consuming core curriculum's for their 4-year degree programs. Especially in the area of post-high school remedial education in the freshman and sophomore years as they re-teach basic reading, writing, maths and sciences earlier received in a student's teen years. For some perhaps this is necessary but for many it delays graduation and ages our nation's dwindling workforce.

Not only does this system withhold America’s youth from acquiring an earlier apprenticeship but it presents a degree-competency turn-around that is imprudent. Beyond the industrial revolution’s requirements for “reading, writing and arithmetic” has now come the outcry for a more specific knowledge and skill subsets that is not readily available for job outsourcing. Today’s current four year high school programs and “college prep” curriculas are not producing the needs that our global societies are requesting. Jobs are being lost to global manufacturing and whole cities are displacing their brain trust and work forces in employment relocation efforts across America. As a nation we have lost our entrepreneurial edge in industry and it is being reflected all too well within our non-entrepreneurial educational systems.

The question as to how we as a nation efficiently train young people for the necessary tasks at hand is an old question. Is it enough to sufficiently train a culture, a community, a society to effectively maintain itself, or is it more necessary to over-train a society to meet the challenges of new frontiers, new technologies, new resources? Quick, efficient educational paths can adapt to the former pursuit but how does a society still retain its ability to broadly educate and meet all the future demands it may place on itself necessarily? That is an ancient question city-states have struggled with. Because our schools do not allow occupational apprenticeships within its curricula it retards the former question at the expense of the latter's need to broadly train competent, motivated, talented individuals. It is bankrupting our educational system on many levels from support to personnel to facility/asset resources. But by acquiescing, and providing trained apprenticeships more directly into the workforce it will create a more effective community of workers who can support their school system through infrastructural supports like expanded resources (both fiscal and human), experientially and pragmatically. This would then prevent a community's network-of-neighborhoods from urban blight and regional job displacement as high schools meet the demand for specific job training and placement that capital consumerism necessarily demands.

Thus, it is important to streamline our educational system to better reflect its regional needs while balancing its global needs to compete and succeed in less understood and under-commercialized projects. To train for the frontiers of knowledge import while not neglecting to support the current markets being effectively applied. Not everyone can or should be involved in the frontiers of market creation, but it is important to keep a community fiscally solvent enough so that it can determine its own destiny through work placement and market support.

To this I would begin an educational list that would summarize these initiatives:

1 Create high school (and college) degree programs of 2, 3, and 4 years, as pertaining to the subject area of expertise required while removing any graduation requirement barriers thusly.

1b Allow for a mixture of curricular degree programs of choice (cross-over majors) as well as a mixture of curricular and academic programs should future college training be sought.

2 Remove all state core requirements and infuse "elective majors" beginning in 7th, 8th, and 9th grades with concentrations in:

• Engineering and Technology
• Medical Sciences and Services
• Business and Finance
• Specific Trades School (Design, Construction, Aircraft Maintenance, etc)
• The Arts and Humanities (Music, Theatre, Dance)

3 Provide earlier apprenticeship programs in middle school and high school and remove unnecessary core competency requirements.

3b Expect to place youth into the workforce more rapidly while recognizing that not all students have the same interests, talents or abilities. And that some may require more training than others regarding their elective choices and talents.

4 Elevate middle school requirements to incorporate the basic academic curricula of the early high school years (place 9th/10th grade basics into the 6th through 8th grades).

5 Reduce college term lengths from 4 to 3 to 2 years by removing unnecessary/repetitive class and remedial educational requirements that major universities currently undertake in the freshman and sophomore years.

6 Provide for more pervasive online instruction but not so as to displace the traditional teacher role with simply “teacher-mentors”. Personal instruction is still invaluable to the overall success of any student's mentoring process.

7 Do not neglect to give early instruction and appreciation for differing cultures and faiths that successful global communications will require in business and networking.

8 Privatize public schools for better community management and development (as versus the slower, less effective, less nimble, state and federal educational systems now in place).

9 Virtualize school boundaries with a pay-in system for non-district students through Internet resourcing.

Concluding Observations

The public education of the 1930's that offered assembly-line models of mass learning is effectively broken and must re-engage its consumer base. A nationalized education system retards effective entrepreneurial market development, is slower to respond, and more costly to retain than a regionally-driven educational model.

America must be able to compete in the 21st Century and cannot with its outmoded, ineffective and obsolete public school educational system. Teens need viable job choices by 16 and 17 years of age and it is in the best economic interests of the US to graduate their kids within occupational program studies.

By not capitalizing on differentiating a study program's majors until a kid's sophomore or junior college term we are creating enormous costs on our school systems and on our society at-large. Nor can we compete against India and China’s educational mills with their larger population resources. We must train earlier and more efficiently than ever before and cannot be satisfied in placing our students into the workforce at 22-25 years of age. We have to lower that age group beginning with 16-17 years of age and more effectively train those who decide to remain within it.

In the most sublime sense, it is time and money that we compete most against. Not against other nations or their economies. For it is time that equates to opportunity and money that equates to the seizure of those opportunities. To demand that the national student population be equally competent with one another is to drive down all our students to the most basic, minimal level of education. And to restrict early graduation is to prevent the help and assistance that a younger apprenticeship work force could lend to their supporting community.

One could go on and on with this type of reasoning but it is enough to say that our public schools must radically reform and essentially disappear as ineffective and outmoded operations. The time is now for clear, decisive, chaotic reform to begin.

RE Slater

February 17, 2011